[Funding alert] Rephrase.ai raises $1.5M seed round led by Lightspeed Ventures

Rephrase.ai, the Bengaluru-based AI-led synthetic media production startup, on Thursday said it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Ventures and AV8 Ventures.

The deeptech startup plans to use the capital raised to scale its AI-powered video personalisation platform, strengthen its commercial presence in North America, and expand its engineering and research teams based out of Bengaluru, India.

Speaking on the investment, Ashray Malhotra, CEO, Rephrase.ai, said, “Now, enterprises can create high-quality video content for targeted sales and marketing initiatives while saving time and money. This technology will change the way we think about video production, both for business communication today, and filmmaking in the future.”

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The startup was founded in 2018 by three IIT graduates — Ashray Malhotra, Shivam Mangla, and Nisheeth Lahoti — in 2018.

The SaaS startup claims to make the creation of personalised videos as simple as writing a text email, and can generate millions of personalised videos without the production cost and effort of doing it manually in a studio.

The core principle behind the AI video platform is a facial-reenactment technology, which predicts lip movements, facial expressions, and head movements.

The startup is already seeing demand for personalised videos from digital marketing agencies and B2B SaaS enterprises for the creation of sales and marketing video content across multiple industries, including automotive, ecommerce, entertainment, financial services, and real estate. The platform enables brands to address every customer individually with video content.

On the investment into Repharse.ai, Hemant Mohapatra, Partner, Lightspeed India Partners, said, “We are already seeing companies run video-based marketing campaigns that see click-through rates of 4X over other personalised emails, but these videos are recorded individually, are expensive, and unscalable. Rephrase.ai’s platform allows companies to create millions of personalised videos using real models with just text as input.”

Rephrase.ai aims to unlock creativity by making it possible for anyone to create high-quality videos at a lower cost and shorter time.